Mass Graves

There isn't a mass grave in my neighborhood a creek has never flooded (there is no creek, after all) and bones have not surfaced. A bulldozer never grinds to a halt stayed by a smiling white skull. The driver doesn’t jump down doesn’t sift through the remains kneeling there on the plot. I once found a grey limb jutting out from a hill. I hoped it was a bone maybe a femur from yore, the last limb of a virulent Ute protecting his home— built by him with his arms and legs with the tools of the plains. His scalp no more, his skin long gone but the bone remaining still staking claim for the living and free. But it wasn’t a bone— it was a tree limb because there aren’t graves in my neighborhood. There aren’t even real trees or game trails; there aren’t survivors or failures let alone corpses and fleas And the only war left to fight is against omnipresent me.